The Touhou PC-98 Restoration Project | Hacker News Reader

The Touhou PC-98 Restoration Project

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153 pointsretro_guy29 comments

I always wondered why it was the sixth position in the series that gained mainstream appeal.

I haven't played the game, but it's hard to ignore the culture that grew around it - especially that just like every device will eventually be made to run DOOM, every display device will eventually be made to show "Bad Apple".

It was the first of the series that was a Windows game, was it not?

for me I got stuck on that one for awhile because the music caught me and the gameplay was just complicated enough to be fun.

the later mechanics added were tedious imo, and I never got into the music as much.

All first five titles in the Touhou series can only run on PC98. The sixth title is the first one to run on windows.

There was also a large amount of revamp of the settings, backgrounds and characters. The first 5 titles have settings so different their stories are rarely considered canon now.

There is no accepted theory. There are indeed multiple defining differences between the 6th title and all others including earlier titles: the first Windows title, the inavailability of detailed backstory (thus a fertile ground for derivative works), the only title with obviously Western characters and so on, but none of them seems crucial for the eventual popularity. If you ask me, my guess is that it was just a pure luck.

I'd say the Windows compat was probably it, though.

Who here owned a bonafide NEC PC-98 at any point outside of those in Japan?

The popularity of Touhou series didn't reach the Western world for a few more years. The tipping point in Japan is thought to be the 8th title (Imperishable Night in 2004) and I believe it took another 3 or 4 years for Touhou to be reasonably popular outside of Japan; the earliest known "Touhou hijack" in 4chan was around 2008 for example, and as a South Korean, I myself learned of Touhou in c. 2006 via a doujin music. The 6th title then became popular among other titles in the series somehow.

I only know about it because I watched someone play it one time, it looks like an incredibly challenging thing to do well.

In addition to the factors mentioned by other replies, Embodiment of Scarlet Devil was a huge shift in design; the prior games felt a lot like a bullet hell aesthetic backported to an '80s platform/engine, whereas Embodiment of Scarlet Devil was much more directly influenced by contemporaneous arcade games like Guwange and Giga Wing.

It was the first release for Windows and there was some hype around it as it was the first game Zun release in 4 years. Windows was mainstream worldwide. PC98 was not.

While all of the music from every game of Touhou is pretty great, EoSD had some stand-out tracks:

Apparitions Stalk the Night: https://youtu.be/0GOA3kvP3Lg?t=270

Septette for the Dead Princess: https://youtu.be/0GOA3kvP3Lg?t=2210

And of course, the one and only U.N. Owen was Her?: https://youtu.be/0GOA3kvP3Lg?t=2757

Edit: For those curious about the gameplay, this is from Embodiment of Scarlet Devil (the 6th game): https://youtu.be/zZu2O_JQ4vs

And this is from Mountain of Faith (the 10th game), boss starts at 1:05: https://youtu.be/6S2dQ8A7fm4

I've never played Touhou because I don't really like bullet hells, but the music from Touhou is just so dang good. I usually listen to the OST or (instrumental) fan arrangements while I work. My current favorites are Kuroneko Lounge's house set arrangements:

House set of Subterranean Animism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bycuWJH2sYw

House set of Phantasmagoria of Flower View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLgMmoiR5fA

I'll throw my recommendation behind them as well, they are a really cool (and large) set of albums Shame that the original artist doesn't sell many of them anymore

I'll add to that the credit music: https://youtu.be/0GOA3kvP3Lg?t=3107. It fits the end of the game really well.

Don't forget Beloved Tomboyish Girl (Cirno's theme): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GOA3kvP3Lg&t=547s Or the classic remix and animation, Cirno's Perfect Math Class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_bQNPG2OyE

Happy 9/9!

I'm nearly certain that the remix culture of Touhou has led to Zun to being the most covered artist of all time.

But don't just take my word for it: https://touhoudb.com/

To add to that, the Touhou Loseless Music Collection torrent on the cat website is currently at 3.3 TiB, and features more than 1900 different circles (bands I guess?). I think if you count someone playing a song on a guitar as a cover he's probably not the most covered artist of all time, but if you measure it on availability of hobbyist covers, he might very well be.

Another data point: The Reitaisai[1], a convention focused solely on Touhou Project, where hundreds if not thousands of circles (groups) sell fan-made content, including music.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touhou_Project#Reitaisai

I'm really happy to see all of these projects to decompile classic games, and do byte for byte matching to prove equivalence. For those who aren't aware there's a rapidly growing scene for decomp projects, largely in N64 games[1], but that scene is spreading to many other different console and PC gaming communities as well. I've seen decomp projects for GameCube, Wii, GBA, and more. There's even a dedicated website made for helping to produce matching code on a per function basis[2] for many different architectures. If anyone is interested in getting involved, feel free to message me for more details and I'll see if I can help point you to the right community for your interests.

[1] https://github.com/n64decomp/

[2] https://decomp.me/

I've never gotten (into) Touhou culture. What's the appeal? Do you like other music besides VGM? Were you into the tracker scene and it's mostly a way to keep that alive? Was there a common board or chan everyone hung out on?

It's just always been right outside the periphery of any social group or outlet I've been part of.

> I've never gotten (into) Touhou culture. What's the appeal?

Great music and tons of remixes, lots of characters with fun personalities (established in both canon and fanon), untold amounts of fanart and fanfiction, and there's a Touhou game or fangame in any genre you can think of.

It's an "open source" success story, just with intellectual property instead of software. Lots of what's kept Touhou popular over the years has been community-produced works, whether that's Bad Apple, Flash videos with IOSYS songs, yukkuris, or these days, fumos.

The tracks are often fantastic as background music (e.g. for work), at least the ones without lyrics.

Very nice examples are the Cafe de Touhou albums: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RY7FpB9BZH4

It's also very enjoyable for me to see how different the interpretations of all those small music circles are. You can get the same melody / leitmotif as e.g. heavy metal, Jazz or Irish folk.

I like non-VGM music, too, of course. But e.g. Electric Callboy is not really the best music to concentrate to. YMMV, though. :D

It's Undertale but made in Japan. Attractive world building and back story combined with a healthy supply of derivative work from talented content makers and you got it.

The project has a proper website[0], with a progress blog[1].

0. https://rec98.nmlgc.net/

1. https://rec98.nmlgc.net/blog

"highly responsive to prayers" has a somewhat of a unique gameplay and is not a vertical-scrolling stg like the other games in the series. in fact, I don't think I have ever seen anything similar. you should give it a try.

Just watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgGhm7u6sr4, it's great!

My favorite video game franchise (Ys) has its roots on the PC-98. Thankfully not only the code seems to have been preserved considering Ys 1 and 2 are the games with the most ports I currently know up to modern PC era.

I always wanted to play the first game in the series! It looked really interesting compared to the others, since it looks like a weird mix of Arkanoid and Space Invaders

Check Taisei as a libre Touhou game.

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